


Mac + Nick

by Nevcolleil



Category: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, MacGyver (TV 2016)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-11
Updated: 2019-03-11
Packaged: 2019-11-15 20:21:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,423
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18080258
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Nevcolleil/pseuds/Nevcolleil
Summary: 5 Cases Mac and Nick Might Have Solved (In AUs Where They May Have Met)1. Nick gets the CSI Director promotion in L.A., not San Francisco. Set post-"The End Game", post-"MacGyver + MacGyver”





	Mac + Nick

The way they meet is all wrong - and Nick does mean _all_.

First of all, there’s a dead body involved. A middle-aged man collapsed in a family pizza place - right there between the skee ball lanes and the ticket counter - and the kid’s prints are all over the db.

Second - by ‘kid’, Nick does mean _kid_ , or close enough. Blonde and blue-eyed and model-pretty, he isn’t even thirty. And he helped to render aid when the deceadent started to defib, multiple witnesses have confirmed that, but the _way_ he rendered aid isn’t like anything that Nick has ever seen.

Around their apparent 914H, the guts of a disassembled cash register lay scattered. The cash register is plugged into the thick extension cord meant to power one of the nearby arcade games. Stripped wires spill out of it like stuffing from a torn plushie doll, gathered and twisted at their ends around the base of either one of two metal pizza spatulas.

“Are you a doctor, Mr. MacGyver?” Nick asks.

“Mac. Call me Mac,” the kid - _Mac_ \- tells him. Those big blues are damned distracting, and Nick is _damned_ old to be noticing.

Hell. He’s old enough to have worked a scene here when Mac was a _literal_ kid, had Nick been in L.A. then.

“And, uh... no. No, I just. I thought I could help.”

“By jerry-rigging a crash cart out of a cash register and some kitchen equipment?”

Mac blushes at that. He _blushes_. The SCI side of Nick - ‘the only side a witness at a scene is supposed to see, Stokes, Jesus’ - notices that this isn’t typical of someone who isn’t used to men dropping dead in front of him. The other side spares a fleeting thought to how far the pink on Mac’s skin might spread past the collared neckline of Mac’s button-up shirt.

“Craig - the kid who works the ticket counter on Thursday nights?”

“Yeah?”

“He was already administering CPR," Mac says, “but I knew that the odds of surviving a heart attack decreases 7-10 percent every minute that defibrilation is delayed, and paramedic response times in this neighborhood aren’t the best.”

That’s interesting information for a not-doctor to know.

“And it seemed obvious to you that Mr. Jeffries was having a heart attack?” Nick asks.

“The signs seemed obvious enough. He was stumbling around and breathing heavily... clutching at his chest. When I got close enough, I could see that he was really sweating. And he was wearing a Medical ID bracelet.”

That’s fair. Nick actually has no reason, at this point, to believe that Frank Jeffries’ death was anything other than it seems - tragic but inevitable (the guy’s son said he just had a double by-pass a few months ago, and here he was taking his boy to Cholestorol City, pizza grease shiny on his fingertips and chin.)

Other than the enigma that is Angus MacGyver, that is. And it’s possible that the things Nick finds most enigmatic about the man have nothing to do with the dead body being wheeled away behind them as they speak.

“So you come here a lot, Mac?” Nick asks. Before immediately wanting to punch himself in the face.

He sees those blue eyes he’s found so distracting widen, and Mac stutters, “I- What?”

Nick hopes like hell that now _he_ isn’t the one blushing.

“You know a thing or two about the neighborhood,” Nick just carries on, as if what he asked didn’t sound like what it did when Nick asked it. “And you’re familiar with Craig Carpenter’s work schedule. Or do you just know Carpenter personally?”

Mac doesn’t look so young that he could know Carpenter _that_ personally... (Unless Nick has totally gotten the wrong measure of Mac, as a SCI and as a man, and there’s an entirely different crime here he ought to be investigating, but Nick doubts it.) Unless they’re family or-

“No. No, nothing like that,” Mac explains. “I do. Come here kind of a lot, I guess. My partner- Sorry. Ex-partner... He takes his daughter here sometimes, and he introduced me to this place. I guess I’ve just gotten used to coming here to think.”

Nick supposes his skepticism at that answer is clear. Even with the restaurant shut down, some of the games spread throughout the wide open dining room continue to trill or whir or play some kind of peppy tune. The chatter of children and the frazzled voices of their parents drifts in through the open restaurant doors, hinting at the kind of din that usually fills this space.

“That... sounds weird, I know,” Mac says quickly, rubbing at the back of his neck, dropping his gaze in a way that Nick forces himself to analyze for signs of guilt or dishonesty - at odds with his more immediate reaction of simply thinking that Mac’s bashful awkardness is ridiculously cute. “But all the background noise - it helps me clear my head.”

That’s something Mac needed quite a lot, Nick gathers, analyzing also the light smudges under Mac’s eyes, the decidedly unhappy clouds that had fogged over his bright gaze as he’d corrected himself and said ‘ _Ex_ -partner’. 

Hopefully Nick’s response to the answers he finds in _that_ analysis are less clear.

If he’s too old to be distracted by a pretty face and flirty eye contact, Mac is definitely too young to look this heartbroken. But then, heartache doesn’t really have an age range, Nick supposes.

“So your ex and his kid weren’t here with you?” Nick asks.

“He’s not- No. No... I was alone.”

And there are those clouds again. Nick quietly adds ‘he’s not over a recent breakup’ to his mental list of all of the reasons why the way he’s met Angus MacGyver is all wrong for the ridiculous notion that’s nonetheless formed at the back of his head.

He’s been doing this job a long time. This isn’t the first time he’s met someone interesting and attractive out in the field. Not nearly the first time he’s gotten the vibe that his interest is returned. 

But it’s the first time in a long time that Nick’s felt so tempted to answer an assessing gaze like Mac’s with some sign of reciprocation - in spite of all the reasons why it would be a bad idea if he did. 

“You know, not that it’s any of my business,” he’s saying before he’s even decided he wants to say it, “but there are an awful lot of places here in L.A. where a man can be alone that don’t involve adults walking around in giant animal costumes. I mean, unless he’s into that kind of thing.”

And then Nick adds, before Mac can take what he’s saying the wrong way, “For example, there’s this place on seventh street, the Leo. Good beer, decent turnout. And you don’t have to eat bad pizza or shake hands with a giant rat to fit in around there.”

Mac is sharp. That definitely goes on Nick’s internal list of reasons why he’s _ignoring_ his list of reasons not to start anything with a guy he met at a crime scene. One half his age and obviously dealing with his own shit. Who’s way too comfortable around dead people for someone who doesn’t work with them, and who was hanging out at a cheesy eatery meant to appeal to children-

Mac instantly seems to get what Nick is working towards getting at, and his smile stops Nick’s first list of reasons from looping any longer in his head.

“You go there a lot?” he asks, in the same tone that Nick had asked him about hanging around this place.

Nick grins. “Kind of a lot,” he says, using Mac’s own words from that portion of their conversation. “Tequila helps me clear my head.”

Mac just looks at him for a moment, then he smiles again, and Nick goes ahead and lets himself think it freely this time - the guy’s adorable when he looks bashful.

“Good to know, Mr. Stokes.”

“Call me Nick.”

And Mac does, when they meet up a week later at the Leo.

He also ends up building a stomach pump out a bunch of random stuff and a disassembled margarita machine, but that’s not really Nick’s problem once the EMT’s have wheeled away the girl who OD’d and he and Mac have given their statements.

Nick is off the clock at the time, at least, and the girl lives, so he figures he and Mac should count _this_ time as progress.


End file.
